NEW ORLEANS – They waited, and they waited, and then
they waited some more in the 90-degree heat, as many as 5,000 people huddled
at a highway underpass on Interstate 10, waiting for buses that never arrived
to take them away from the storm they could not escape.

Babies cried. The sick huddled in the shade in wheelchairs or rested on cots.

A few others, less patient, simply
started walking west with nowhere to go, among them a man pushing a bike
with one hand and pulling a shopping cart with the other.

But most just waited with resignation – sad, angry,
incredulous, scared, exhausted people who seemed as discarded as the empty
bottles of water and containers of food that littered the ground.

New Orleans has always existed in a delicate balance
between land and water, chaos and order, black and white, the very rich and
the very poor.

It also has been a place of crushing poverty, of dreary
low-income housing and failing schools, where crime and violence have been
an incessant shadow in daily life, as much a part of the local sensibility
as the damp, smothering blanket of heat and humidity.

Bit by bit, that delicate balance came completely
undone after Hurricane Katrina. Water took over earth when levees broke,
putting 80 percent of the city underwater. The mix of fatalism and bravado
that allowed the city's biggest fear – a killer hurricane – to become the
national drink of Bourbon Street gave way to terror and despair and horrifying
spasms of looting and violence. Faced with a disaster of enormous proportions,
everything fell apart.

The flood-control apparatus, which government officials
and scientists had long said was inadequate, failed as some predicted. The
city's evacuation plan worked, except for thousands who were too poor or
disabled to find their own way out of the city before the storm. The radios
and cell phones that officials and police officers use to communicate failed,
erasing any remaining semblance of authority in a city beset by chaos and
crime. Just two months ago, new evidence emerged that city and its levees
were sinking, increasing the risk of a catastrophic flood, even as federal
funds to protect the city were being cut.

As floodwaters rose Tuesday, Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La.,
tried to impress upon colleagues in Washington that this was America's tsunami,
but she said the more she pleaded, the more she felt she wasn't being heard.
Most local officials who were supposed to be running the city eventually
left, mainly because they couldn't communicate with the outside world, whose
help they desperately needed.

The brewing storm

It began as Tropical Depression 12, yet another swirl
of turbulence in the southeastern Bahamas. But each step of the way, Hurricane
Katrina seemed to overachieve.

"We are facing a storm that most of us have long feared,"
said Mayor Ray Nagin, who urged people Aug. 27 to leave town and then gave
an evacuation order the next day, when it looked as if a Category 5 storm,
with winds as high as 175 miles an hour, could be headed for New Orleans.
"This is a once-in-a-lifetime event."

Many of the 1.3 million people in the metropolitan
area departed, but many didn't. This surprised no one. In a 2003 poll conducted
by Louisiana State University researchers, 31 percent of New Orleans residents
said they would stay in the city even if a Category 4 hurricane struck.

Many stayed because they felt they had no choice, particularly the poor and the elderly.

Brian Wolshon, an LSU civil engineering professor
who served as a consultant on the state evacuation plan, said the city relied
almost entirely in its planning on a good-Samaritan scenario, in which residents
would check on elderly and disabled neighbors and drive them out of the city
if necessary.

Planning for their evacuation was stymied by a shortage
of buses, he said. As many as 2,000 buses, far more than New Orleans possessed,
would be needed to evacuate an estimated 100,000 seniors and disabled people.

But Chester Wilmot, an LSU civil engineering professor
who studies evacuation plans, said the city successfully improvised. He said
witnesses described seeing city buses shuttle residents to the Superdome
before Hurricane Katrina struck.

"What I've heard is that there were buses, but they weren't very well utilized," Wilmot said.

The professors agreed that the evacuation of New Orleans
residents with cars went well. They said a new "contraflow plan," which used
all lanes of I-10 for outbound traffic, relieved congestion that snarled
traffic for hours during a voluntary evacuation of the city last year during
Hurricane Ivan. "What you're going to find is that everyone who wanted to
get out, got out," Wolshon said. "Except for the people who didn't have access
to transportation."

Flood protection?

Hurricane Betsy in September 1965 had spurred a federal hurricane protection plan for Lake Pontchartrain and the vicinity.

But the system that emerged was a compromise from
the start, cut back by competing Army Corps of Engineers projects, by pressure
from local communities that had to pay part of the cost, and by the tendency
to focus more on current costs than on future risks.

Officials settled on a system of levees sufficient
to protect against another Hurricane Betsy – a Category 3 storm – the kind
that statistics estimate might strike New Orleans once in 200 years.

Computer simulations showed ever more clearly how
New Orleans could swamp like a low boat in high seas under the assault from
certain hurricanes.

Still, the compromises over flood protection persisted.

On Monday, there was nothing dramatic when the levee
failed, no sound of an explosion or a crash. At midday, as the storm was
blowing out of the city, the Web site of The Times-Picayune quoted
residents near the 17th Street Canal saying that after experiencing only
minor flooding from the storm, suddenly the water in their yards was rising
from what seemed to be a breach in the canal.

By 4:20 p.m. Monday, the Web site reported that the
water already had rolled through the nearby Lakeview neighborhood and down
to the center of the city.

The berms along Lake Pontchartrain had held. The problem
was in canals that had been built to carry water pumped from city drains
out to the lake. But Monday, with the lake rising, the flow in the canals
reversed.

A surge, probably 10 feet above normal, flowed in
from the lake, rising until it began cascading over the top of the walls
that stood between the east side of the 17th Street Canal and the city's
Bucktown neighborhood.

Greg Breerwood, a deputy district engineer for the
Army Corps of Engineers, said it appeared that as the weight of the water
pressed on the high part of the wall, the water pouring over the top hit
the ground on the other side and ate away at the soil supporting its base.

A section of the wall pushed in, and the rush of water turned that breach into a gash as long as a football field, 100 yards.

Once the levee broke, most longtime New Orleans residents
knew the city could unravel quickly, with nothing to stop the lake from pouring
into neighborhoods that were still dry and surging across a huge city park
and into downtown.

Landrieu, who grew up in New Orleans, was at the federal
and state command center in Baton Rouge when the first warnings about the
break flashed Monday afternoon.

The next stage

She and other local officials suddenly faced a new
problem: convincing federal officials that just one break in one canal with
such a mundane name could bring on a cataclysm that would require far more
resources than had been needed for the storm itself.

"I have been with Michael Brown since the minute he
landed in this center," Landrieu said Friday in Baton Rouge, referring to
the director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, "and I have been
telling him from the moment he arrived about the urgency of the situation."

But, she added, "I just have to tell you that he had a difficult time understanding the enormity of the task before us."

Natalie Rule, a spokeswoman for FEMA, disputed Landrieu's
account. "There was no doubt in our minds that a Category 3, 4 or 5 headed
for New Orleans was going to be dangerous," Rule said.

As the flood-control system broke down, so did everything else.

There was no immediate announcement that the levee
had been breached or what it meant, but different people realized at different
times that maybe the bullet had not been dodged after all.

The evacuation before the storm, as chaotic as it
seemed to anyone stuck on the road, was still part of a plan. With the levee
break, a new stage began.

There had been no plans for what to do with stranded
tourists. With the Superdome overloaded and without food or air conditioning,
the hotels guided visitors to the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center. But
the situation there devolved into anarchy, too.

"The tourists are walking around there and . . . they're
being preyed upon," said P. Edwin Compass III, superintendent of police.
"We have 15 to 20,000 people in there that is trapped. We have individuals
who are getting raped. We have individuals who are getting beaten."

The flooded 9th

Before dawn Tuesday, Landrieu's brother, Mitch, the
state's lieutenant governor, and Sgt. Troy McConnell of the state police
left Baton Rouge to assist in the rescue of flooded residents of the 9th
Ward in New Orleans. Mitch Landrieu knew the city intimately, but now he
was navigating the lower 9th Ward not by car, but by boat. The four men on
board would cut the engine and float in watery silence, listening for calls
for help from inside houses or attics.

People yelled from rooftops or waved shirts or rags, as if they were flags, from vents in the attic.

They must have rescued 100 people, Mitch Landrieu
said, but by the end of the day, the mood began to change to one of irritated
impatience.

Soon there was a small army of refugees with no place
to go who were deposited on the island of dry land at the edge of I-10 in
Metairie.

During the long, hot afternoon and into the humid
night, the crowd swelled to 2,000 hungry, flood-weary people, residents of
the northern neighborhoods and of St. Bernard Parish to the northeast who
had been plucked from roofs and attics.

Chermaine Daniels, 49, had left her flooded one-story
home in the 9th Ward on Tuesday morning, gashing her ankle on a fence as
she struggled to swim to a neighbor's two-story house. Later that day, Daniels
and several others were rescued by a uniformed officer in a boat and deposited
at an I-10 encampment.

"What do we do now?" she asked the boat's pilot.

"You're on your own," the pilot replied.

Little help

Increasingly, local officials also felt they were on their own.

On Tuesday night, Nagin complained that while federal
officials agreed that morning that stemming the flow from the breach was
the highest priority, "it didn't get done."

Landrieu said that by Wednesday, with little visible response from the federal government, she talked to FEMA officials.

"I started to sense they were thinking I was a little overwrought, that maybe I was exaggerating a little bit," she said.

When the senator pressed Brown on when he was going
to finally get buses to pick up the people who were trapped at the Superdome,
"he just mumbled," she said.

By then, state leaders also had an array of other
complaints. People were infuriated about the lack of National Guard troops
to keep order and end the looting.

Also, many asked, how could the Corps of Engineers,
which builds and takes care of the levees, have not had a contingency plan
for dealing with a levee breach, especially in such a critical spot? And
each time another federal agency offered to help, FEMA seemed to delay in
providing guarantees that it would reimburse them later.

For example, a defense agency had packages of communications
gear ready to deploy and held them while awaiting FEMA's approval, two congressional
aides said.

In New Orleans, city officials were trying to keep some semblance of control over their city, and failing.

The most basic reason was a massive breakdown of the
communications system. Cell phones failed and satellite phones did not arrive
for several days, said Rep. Charlie Melancon, D-La.

At the convention center, food and water grew scarce.
Victims' bodies sagged in wheelchairs. Residents reported hearing bursts
of sporadic gunfire. A number of city police officers walked off their jobs
in despair.

By Wednesday, many city officials left for Baton Rouge,
mainly because they couldn't communicate with the outside world and they
needed to work with the federal and state leaders directing operations from
the command center there.

By Thursday, local officials were yelling and screaming in public.

Col. Terry Ebbert, director of homeland security for
New Orleans, complained that "the rest of the goddamn nation can't get us
any resources for security." He added, "It's like FEMA has never been to
a hurricane."

Finally, hope

Friday, for the first time, there was a dose of hope.

President Bush's visit to New Orleans, where he met
with Nagin, and to the rest of the tattered Gulf Coast region helped calm
some tensions. Referring to the federal emergency actions, Bush said, "What
is not working right, we're going to make it right."

The first sizable contingent of troops rolled into
town and restored a measure of order to the convention center. There was
food and water. There was a sense that maybe things at least would stop getting
worse.

Louisiana's other U.S. senator, Republican David Vitter,
called FEMA's response completely dysfunctional, completely overwhelmed.
He said the death toll might reach 10,000 unless the rescue is speeded up.

But this sense of expectancy dissipated at the causeway
on I-10, where the crowd of refugees had swollen from about 2,500 to 5,000,
said Lt. Michael Field of the Louisiana State Police.

"It's worse today," he said. "There's no command structure that I can see."